Captain Bobby Fachiri

Captain Bobby Fachiri, who has died aged 92, won an MC serving with T-Force,
an elite Army formation, in the final weeks of the Second World War.

7:16PM BST 04 Apr 2012

At the instigation of Ian Fleming, then with Naval Intelligence, a detachment of Commandos known as 30 Assault Unit (30AU) began, in the wake of the invasions of North Africa and Italy, to seize key items of enemy technology. These included coding machines as well as secret weapons. T (for Target)-Force operated on the same principle during the drive into Germany, often racing against time to secure research facilities before they were destroyed, or to find prominent scientists and industrialists before they fell into the hands of the Soviets.

Captain Bobby Fachiri

The 5th Battalion the King’s Regiment (Liverpool) was part of the force, and on April 30 1945 Fachiri, commanding its reconnaissance platoon, was ordered to take nine recce cars to the Lübeck-Travemünde area on the Baltic coast. His objective was to prevent the destruction of the seaplane base and the Luftwaffe experimental station there.

He arrived at Travemünde soon after dawn to be met by about 4,000 German troops, armed, and in what was later described as “an uncertain mood of acceptance of the surrender”. Having persuaded them to lay down their arms he found that the only road east was jammed by thousands of civilians, trying to flee the Russians. To prevent his unit from being swamped, and thereby endangering his mission, Fachiri closed this road and mounted a guard.

Mindful of the dangers of last-minute sabotage, he then used 20 French PoWs whom he had found to guard the airfield and the Luftwaffe research base. As he was still short of men, he then crossed back over the river and mobilised the local police. “Within half an hour,” he wrote later, “Hauptmann Baumgarten appeared with the finest array of toughs I have ever seen. They were just what we required to control the unruly mass of humanity which was still on the road.”

When 1st Battalion the Northamptonshire Regiment arrived a little later, Fachiri was able to borrow a rifle company to guard the German Institution of Aviation works and the experimental base for seaplanes. But Fachiri found that the Blohm and Voss flying boat factory, repair station and assembly yards were still occupied by German troops. Heading straight there with three reconnaissance cars, he was greeted by several German staff officers on the steps of the officers’ mess. A clerk already sitting behind a typewriter typed out a formal surrender of 30 officers and engineers, 200 soldiers and all buildings and equipment. A drive around the station revealed that there was enough material to assemble 150 aircraft.

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Fachiri then had to make arrangements for the feeding of 4,000 PoWs as well as the German civilians. He organised a conference between the senior German officers, the Bürgermeister, the chief of police and the telephone exchange supervisor at which it was decided that the police would be responsible for feeding the soldiers from their reserve rations, and that the Bürgermeister would be responsible for feeding the civilians .

Over the next few days advance parties of the RAF Regiment took over the aerodrome and the Blohm and Voss works, while the Royal Navy took over the seaplane experimental base at Travemünde. Fachiri handed over the assembly station to the US Army . On May 8 the war ended and he rejoined the battalion. He was subsequently awarded an MC.

Robert Fachiri was born into a family of cotton traders at Sefton Park, Liverpool, on August 4 1919 and educated at Liverpool College. He began work in the city’s Cotton Market, and on the outbreak of war joined the Royal Artillery before being commissioned into the King’s Regiment (Liverpool). He took part in the D-Day landings in Normandy with the 5th Battalion. The citation for his MC also paid tribute to the skill and determination with which he had kept six anti-tank guns in position for six days in Normandy despite constant sniping and infiltration by enemy patrols.

Fachiri retired from the Army in 1946. The Cotton Market was not reopened for several years and he worked for the Bank of England in Liverpool before starting his own insurance broking firm.

He was a talented painter and, from 1967, made his living as an artist. His pictures have been sold all over the world, and three hang in the Bank of England.

In retirement, he lived in the Wirral.

Bobby Fachiri married first, in 1939, Betty Lord. She predeceased him in 1948, and the next year he married Mary Beardmore, who also predeceased him. He is survived by a son and a daughter of his first marriage and a son and two daughters of his second.